Wednesday, May 9, 2012

A reality check

Miss M has been doing amazingly well. She is loving kindy, and has lots of great friends. She is recalling incidental facts ("Mummy, the baby we saw today was 4 months old"), and growing up everyday ("so, yeh, alright Mum, see you this afternoon"). While I thought she was going so well, a brief conversation with some of the staff jolted me back into reality. You see, Miss M is small; not just little, but extremely small ... Smaller than every other child her age. While she copes really well, it is becoming obvious to me that others find it a challenge. The staff at school say that they are concerned about her safety around other children; that they can be rough and knock her over; that she can't walk with them as they are too tall/too rough/too fast. It seems crazy to me that after all the work we have put in to getting Miss M's language on par with her peers, that it is her size (something we have zero control over) that might be a greater influence on school life. It is frustrating me to no end, and I am not really sure what I can do about it. I know that my little girl is confident, self-assured, assertive, and strong, and I believe that she will succeed at whatever she wants to. I just need to convince everyone else of this ...